Shraddha, a postdoctoral researcher, joined the group in July 2022. She holds a BSc in Microbiology from Abasaheb Garware College, Pune, India (2009) and an MSc in Microbiology from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, India (2011). She has done a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Biology in Jena, Germany, under the guidance of Prof. Christian Kost, graduating in December 2017. During her PhD she focussed on the mechanism of metabolite exchange in bacteria and its effect on biosynthesis. She then started a postdoc project at Leiden University, Netherlands, in March 2018, working on the evolution of complexity in primordial cells using cell wall-deficient forms of Streptomyces. Throughout her research, she has developed expertise in various microscopy techniques.

Shraddha is developing methodology for imaging bacterial communities on tumour tissue. The idea is to use multiplex fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) to simultaneously visualise multiple bacterial taxa. She works closely with Nic Karcher on developing automated image analysis workflows. She is more broadly interested in microbe-microbe interactions in the tumour microenvironment.